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Chicago
Chicago is the third-most populous city in the United States, with some 2.8 million inhabitants in the city proper and over 9.5 million in the metropolitan area. Nick Knight favoured it as a place of residence in the second half of the twentieth century, moving on and then returning some years later to a new identity and occupation. In the early 1950s, under the name Nicholas Girard, he worked as an Associate Professor in the Archaeology Department at the University of Chicago. However, his secrecy ran him foul of the McCarthy hearings; and, when asked about keeping blood in his house, he was forced to take refuge in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which grants the right not to incriminate oneself. As a result, he lost his job at the university.Spin Doctor In 1964, he joined the Chicago police department, initially assuming that his vampire abilities meant that no special preparation for the job would be required. He later decided it would better to attend the Police Academy for proper training.Amateur Night Like many other police officers, he moonlighted as security guard at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Hearing the speeches, he was strongly tempted to join the campaign of one of the candidates, Tom Gardiner. However, the man raped one of the volunteers; and the resultant scandal ended his bid for the nomination.Beyond the Law. Prior to his arrival in Toronto (around 1989), Nick seems to have once again been living in Chicago. It is not merely that the false history in the records of the Metropolitan Police indicate that he moved to Toronto from Chicago: these records are, after all, fakes. More significantly, when Nick first went to the Raven to catch up with Janette on their years of separation, she indicated that she was aware that he had been in Chicago, and he agreed.Dark Knight However, it is not known what his actual occupation was in the years immediately prior to leaving for Toronto. Nick is known to have lived in other places in between these dates. It follows that his residence in Chicago from the 1950s to 1980s was not one unbroken period of thirty years. Rather, it comprised three separate periods of domicile there, under at least two different aliases. That he has returned to the city repeatedly, with minimal time away, suggests that he likes Chicago a lot. History of Chicago During the mid-eighteenth century the area where Chicago now stands was inhabited by a native American tribe known as the Potawatomis. The first European settler, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, founded the area’s first trading post in the 1770s. The land was ceded to the United States in 1816; but it was not until 1833 that the Town of Chicago was organized near a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed. Within seven years it grew to a population of over 4,000, and was incorporated as a city in 1837. In 1838, there opened both the Illinois and Michigan Canal between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, and hicago’s first railway, the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad. These connected the city to the wider world, resulting in a flourishing economy that brought residents to the city both from rural communities in the U.S. and from abroad. The manufacturing and retail sectors in Chicago became dominant among those of Midwestern cities, influencing the American economy. In particular, Chicago became preeminent in meatpacking: the advent of the refrigerated rail car and the regional centrality of the city's Union Stock Yards meant that the city could supply any part of the country. By the end of the nineteenth century, Chicago had become a major transportation and telecommunications hub in North America. Until the 1980s, it was the second largest city in the United States, before being overtaken by Los Angeles. Today, O'Hare International is the second busiest airport in the world. Today, Chicago proper has over 2.8 million residents. The Chicago metropolitan area has a population of more than 9.5 million people. It is among the world's largest urban areas by population. ::Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Chicago. Category:Cities